Читать книгу Heimat - Liv Hambrett - Страница 2

How it all began …

What drove an Australian without a lick of German, who had never owned a 'proper winter coat' in her life, into the rainy, snowy, rule-loving, meaty arms of Deutschland? Good question. Excellent question. I still, to this day, can’t really answer it because I don’t know if we ever really know what we’re doing in our early 20s, no matter how convinced we are that we do. But I can try and explain. For one thing, Germany isn't London. For another, as a – very young and very inexperienced – writer, I was looking for stories. I needed a big, unexpected, unusual plot twist in an otherwise very lovely, rather uninteresting life. I wanted things to write about and I thought that by digging out my roots and dragging them, coiled and dirty, into a soil entirely different to that which had nourished them for 25 years, I would find precisely that. Tales and morals and lessons learnt, characters and tragedies I could put onto paper, weave into a narrative. And I had two added benefits; I didn't really know precisely what I was doing - oh what we can do when we don't know what we're doing - and I had a warm, solid, unconditional home to return to, should my little body grow aweary of the great world.

Moving to Europe after my studies was a foregone conclusion – I come, after all, both from the generation of nimble feet and instant gratification, and from a country of people who turn up with broad grins and a cold beer in every corner of the world. I had, of course, done my six month 'backpacking' (without, admittedly, a backpack) stint around Europe and the States following university, and soon after lived and worked for a summer on a Greek island. I wanted more. I was ripe for a grand gesture, something more interesting, more daunting. A bigger shock to the system. The UK, London specifically, as an English speaking European country that had disgorged my ancestors on Sydney's shores all those years ago, was the most obvious, but I ruled it out almost immediately on the basis it was already chock full of Australians, many of them old school friends. 'I live in London' had become, and indeed remains, interchangeable with 'I come from Australia'. I needed something more, something European, still, and thus conducive to weekend jaunts across borders, but something a touch more daring. So, you know, I went with Germany.

While my family's connections with Germany go back 160 odd years to a minuscule town in Baden Württemberg, a more recent one laid the foundations for what has become a lifelong relationship with the country – an exchange student. Hailing from Münster, he slotted into our family like my parents' long-lost son and over a decade, our families went back and forth, visiting each other. During my backpacking stint, I spent two months in Münster drinking Jägermeister and being terrified on the Autobahn. And so it was Münster that I returned to in the autumn of 2010 after another mercurial summer spent working on the island of Santorini, making cheap cocktails for cheap backpackers. The old North Rhine-Westphalian city of churches, with its grand old palace turned university, cobbled Altstadt, and millions of bicycles ridden by the immaculately groomed Münsteranians, was the first setting of the grand gesture, the plot twist.

I thought it would be so easy. So seamless. Uni degrees and Working Holiday Visa in hand, I was anxious to set sail, ready to be on the move again. I had a few wonderful friends there, one in particular I would flat with on a big, leafy tree-lined boulevard. I even had prior knowledge of the town I was moving to, knowledge albeit somewhat eviscerated by nights out on Liquor 44 and milk. All that was left was to become fluent in the language, land a wonderful job and become, overnight, a bilingual ingénue tapping out a cult blog and a bestseller simultaneously in cafes on cobbled streets.

Germany and I were, at first, wary of each other – I was the Australian who didn't know the meaning of 'winter jacket' and wore thongs on her feet in Autumn (just down to the shops, for God's sake, but the Germans’ eyes bored holes in my toes). And Münster seemed to know I had no idea what I was doing and take a perverse pleasure in that fact. The language and the pathways, covered in ice or rain or in that winter of 2010, were slippery and I fell over more times than I care to count, slipping and sliding, skinning my shins and bruising my bottom and self-confidence. Decisions were made flailing about, not in indecisiveness, but in not knowing anything about what I was actually making a decision regarding. I struggled to learn a language while working in my own, and the more people lectured me on how I ‘must speak German’, the more I retreated. Beaming myself bang into the middle of an, albeit beautiful city, where no one colours outside the lines was blunt, maddening and terrific. I signed three million pieces of paper, guessed 90% of what the foreigner's office said to me each time they (begrudgingly?) stamped my visa, got very sick, got equally as lost, got fantastically fed up. And I made some completely valuable, giving, intense, connected relationships with people – and myself. My God, did me, myself and I spend some quality time under the bed clothes with revolting quantities of Doppelkeks and 3€ French Merlot while it rained and snowed outside. As we got a little more comfortable with each other, Münster, for all of her completely irritating adherence to neatness and to rules and propriety, for all of her unyielding expectation of doing things the right way or not doing them at all, became another home. We reached an understanding, Münster and I. She and all of the people within her, and ultimately something shifting and growing within me as a clueless, cold foreigner, made Germany a home.

Somewhere in there, in between bottles of 3€ wine, Brötchen and those sugar topped Berliners that resulted in a wardrobe that consisted purely of leggings and large jumpers, I fell in love with a big pair of eyes and the kindest heart. It was only a few months after I moved to Münster and it was Big love*. Serious, wonderful, bone-warming, easy, changing love. The love I am sure my mother dreaded me finding anywhere outside of Australia because it's a game changer, this love. After seven or so months of living, conveniently, in the same city, his job meant we had to begin shuttling between Münster, his home in the north German city of Kiel, and various other German cities, depending on the whim and will of his work. This job would ultimately move us to a tiny town in the south-east of Germany, called Weiden in der Oberpfalz, just a hop, skip and jump away from the Czech border. And after that, back up his home town on the Baltic Sea. It would also make the prospect of living in Australia a very unlikely one indeed.

When that time came to leave Münster and move to Weiden, God I was tired. I was tired of being foreign, tired of signing papers and needing visas and muddling languages, tired of tiny little daily activities being embarrassing lessons in social and cultural norms I was not inherently privy to. Tired of not being from the place I was in. Tired enough to want change, to crave the topsy-turviness of newness guaranteed by a move. Perhaps it would be energising, perhaps it would be enough to jolt something awake. Bavaria was as different to Germany as we could get without actually leaving the country. So even though I had a job in Münster and great friends and the perfect apartment, and even though this tiny town in the middle of the Oberpfalz had absolutely nothing to recommend it except being somewhere else, I pulled my roots up again, and left. There were more stories to find.

We made a home down there and we made a home of each other. The Bavarians were warm and said hello to each other on the street. I stopped calling them Bavarians after a while, when it became clear they weren't just any Bavarians, they were Oberpfälzisch. There is a difference. (There is always a difference in Germany.) Their accent was utterly indecipherable. The main street of Weiden was the length of an average driveway in Australian suburbs. We drove to all of those cute little Medieval towns that Bavaria is dotted with. We drove into the Czech Republic. We drove into the village where, 160 years earlier, my Great Great Great Grandfather had left to make a new home in Australia. Soon after, I got on a plane and flew back to Australia for six months, desperately homesick and desperately uncertain if I was ready to sign on for ‘forever’ on the other side of the world. I went back, ultimately, and we got sent to Kiel for six months, the third city in which to make a home, one six hours closer to Denmark than to our apartment in Weiden. One in which snow and seagulls managed to co-exist in perfect harmony. One that came to be, for me, a Heimat. I finally connected with a place in the country I was in the process of adopting as my home. We sought to get out of Bavaria and move back to Kiel, something we got word we were successful in achieving on the very day we found out we were expecting a baby. Our daughter was born during a long, hot summer, the living embodiment of a cross continental and cultural love**.

All the while, I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. About all of the decisions, the plans, the changes, the choices. The newness, the uncertainty, the frustration and fascination. The homesickness. Love. I wrote about home, what it was, where it was, how to go about making one. I wrote about how, in the space of a couple of years, everything had changed and suddenly Germany, once a country chosen simply because it was different, because it was more interesting than the other options, was now so much more permanent.

And that's what this book is. This book is a collection of stories, of ideas and meditations on all of the dust you kick up when you move countries, when plans and expectations go out the window, and you dive so thoroughly, into something – into a people, into a way of life, a language, a place – so utterly unknown. It is about relationships, with countries, with people, with myself. It is about the Germans, their beautiful country and being quite foreign within it. It is about searching for, finding, and making a Heimat in an endless, gloriously huge, world.

*You will find him referred to, often throughout the following pages, as SG. It stands for Significant German.

** You will find her referred to as Die Lüdde, a Plattdeutsch expression meaning ‘the little one’.